A reminder: BlueSky isn’t decentralized until anybody can install a server and run their own node and communicate freely with every other BlueSky user.
Until then it’s just another Jack-associated social network.
Tomorrow #Threads is coming to #Europe, and I'm more than a little bit curious, how it will play out.
That's where we stand @heiseonline regarding #Traffic from #X/Twitter and its main competitors right now. It's more quick and dirty than my other ones.
Keep in mind, that there's a substantial amount of traffic from #Mastodon, that we currently don't see (because of the #preview cutting of the URL): I'm pretty sure, that Mastodon has already overtaken #Twitter. #Bluesky is far, far behind.
Why do people who are happy with #Mastodon care so much whether or not others are happy with #Twitter or #Bluesky? If you're really concerned for the well-being of marginalized folks, don't you think we can decide for ourselves where we feel most secure?
For the record, I'm a queer Black #trans person who is happy on Mastodon and has no interest in returning to Twitter or checking out Bluesky. I just don't like paternalism or virtue signaling.
First there's the breathtaking confidence that this this exciting AI thing will solve the problem. As if Twitter didn't have literally hundreds of ML engineers working on this for years. YEARS.
Then there's the notion that you could possibly create AI magic without doing enough of the manual work to really understand it. Nope!
Third, there's apparently a belief that a magic technical solution exists to social problems that are so complex that they're demoralizing and hard to deal with.
Fourth, I see no recognition that they should have had at least some starter solutions before letting users on at all.
Lastly, there's the lack of recognition that anti-abuse work, hard though it is, is not nearly as hard as dealing with the abuse.
I'm skeptical of #Bluesky because it's built on the same tech VC mindset that has been so harmful in prior generations of social media.
I'm skeptical of the #fediverse and #Mastodon because Black and brown people get shouted over by tech leftists when they have the audacity to name their experiences here.
That crap shows up in my timeline every single time I log on.
Before you say, "my feed isn't like that," let me ask, "How many Black and brown people do you follow?"
Wow, lousy (& educational) weekend for online communities. #Rust & #Bluesky ripping themselves apart due to not having thought through how to deal with garbage people.
Axiom: Any online anything that has people in it will have garbage people. The time to figure out how to deal with them is before they start throwing garbage.
Look, I'm usually not one to be like-- "see, we told you.."
HOWEVER.
"A Jack Dorsey-backed app building toward decentralization, Bluesky strained its relationship with Black users after failing to moderate threatening comments toward a Black woman, who had previously played a prominent role in bringing more people of color to the app."
This is exactly why I and many others weren't so quick to hop on #bluesky dick. #blackmastodon#blackfedi
Seit einer Weile teilt @heiseonline auch Links zu Artikeln auf #Bluesky (aber nicht automatisch wie hier) und da wollte ich jetzt mal vergleichen: Über die aktuell so gehypte #TwitterAlternative sind in drei Monaten so viele auf heise.de gekommen, wie über #Mastodon an einem normalen Wochentag. #Twitter liegt weiter davor.
@heiseonline hat hier aber auch massiv mehr Follower. Gleichzeitig sind die realen Zahlen von Mastodon höher, weil Klicks auf die #Vorschau ja nicht gezählt werden.
I've been testing DuckDuckGo's App Tracking Protection (beta) for the past 24 hours.
Here's a small comparison between #Twitter#Mastodon and #Bluesky (with about equal usage/screen time).
Bluesky is by far the worst with almost 2200 tracking attempts.
Threads: I'm in a wrong party and don't know what to say. I feel awkward, everyone is so happy with their gym selfies. Everyone asking endless questions and asking things from the algorithm. Lots of people use it like Instagram, every post is a selfie with a meaningless caption. Some are copy-pasting the same sentence over and over again for each line. Endless quote-post memes... What the fuck is this shit I don't even...
Bluesky: A Twitter clone, but still very barebones. Notifications are still not working, there are no hashtags and I don't find any relevant content to me in any of the feeds. It's mostly Facebook-like what's up in life, furry scene and AI photos. No news, no tech/web scene, no nothing. Not to mention it's still invite-only and won't support ActivityPub (yeah I know the reasoning behind that but for me it's mostly bullshit, I look forward to trying bridgy fed).
Mastodon and the Fediverse: Here I'm at home on my own server. Most content, most features. A community is friendly but has also lots of nitpicking, some angry dudes. Still the most safest, most healthy and most customized, but somehow the most hated network elsewhere. "Too techie", they say. "Too difficult", they say. "No algorithm", they say.
Nostr: Kinda promising, but way too obscure, strange and even techier than Mastodon. Too much crypto shit.
Well, that's that. Sometimes I feel like Internet is ruined. But I believe in the open social web movement and I want to see this grow.
In no other place I can write a status update as freely as this, as long as this or with a low bar as this. I LIKE this 100%. The same can't be said in those other places I'm experimenting with out of curiosity. There I'm the weird kid. Here I feel like myself.
If anyone is still trying to get friends, family, co-workers, business leaders, heads of state or literally anyone else to try #Mastodon, I put together a very simple list of reasons which you are welcome to share, copy, steal, improve upon, translate, etc. for your own social media posts, blog, Discord group, skywriting campaign, séance or whatever - no attribution needed - let's just get the word out. Wooo! :catjam:
For this weekend's coding project, I built a tiny single-user Bluesky→ActivityPub one-way bridge I named “Pinhole”. If there's someone on Bluesky whose posts you want in your Mastodon feed, you can download and run it yourself: :fietkau_software: https://fietkau.software/pinhole
Caveats: 1. I intentionally built it anti-scalable: you can use it to follow one Bluesky account from one fedi account, and that's it. 2. You need experience with web servers.
"Bei der nächsten Social-Media-Plattform wird alles anders. Oder: Warum ich mich nicht bei Bluesky anmelde" - meine Gedanken speziell für die Geschichtswissenschaft (aber nicht nur), was man nach der Implosion der Twitter-Community und der Fragmentierung der Social-Media-Landschaft nun tun kann/soll... =>drüben bei Zeitgeschichte Online erschienen https://zeitgeschichte-online.de/node/70045#bluesky#mastodon#twitter#histodons
So, yeah, every time I go to a @pluralistic talk, I change at least one habit. In years past that has included going DRM-free for audiobooks (and picking up lap swimming with a waterproof mp3 player!) and using more security and privacy tools. This time, it's his "fool me once, never fool me again" recommendation of #mastodon over #bluesky that has me going whole-hog here going forward.
Tbh, I'm on a proactively moderated server that has preemptively kept a lot of the worst folks from being able to reach us queers here, and the feedback from a handful of black users here is that #blahajzone has also been generally been harassment free in comparison to other servers they've been on.
Imo, it's actually not to hard as a queer or trans person to find #servers on the #fediverse that will protect you from harassment, but that it is harder to find servers that will also protect indigenous, black, Asian users from racist harassment. And too many queer white folks get a free pass for ignorance tbh, a privilege that many of us have had for far too long.
It's much the same on #Bluesky where I haven't been harassed for being #queer and trans - again there's large communities and plenty of allies - but anti-black racism has been in the spotlight again recently and the devs called out for lagging behind on safety and moderation features that bigots exploit for harassment campaigns.
Far too many fediverse projects are led by men, mostly white men, who are lionised, promoted and financed by another layer of mostly white men. They ultimately get the veto on minority protections.